Top 5 Grammar Mistakes, supposedly

I got an email from Grammarly.com recently about the "top writing mistakes that even the most seasoned novelists make in their work." Now, their methods did not particularly impress me and they haven't even attempted to prove that the writers sampled were seasoned novelists... but their list incited a few thoughts because I'm putting the final polish on Disciple, Part IV.

1. Missing comma
2. Run-on sentences
3. Comma splice
4. Comma misuse
5. Definite vs. Indefinite article use

This list was generated by their auto-proofreading software, so another grain of salt is in order. Still, there are some interesting points. 

#1 and #4 -- in my opinion, commas can be argued about. They're a matter of personal style, to some degree. I view them as a pacing mechanism in a sentence and I use them to indicate a very slight pause in a thought or in dialogue. That's on top of their mechanical functions in separating out lists and parceling clauses. For example: 

The corner store opened on time that morning, which was a first, and I bought a six-pack of beer.

Commas in that sentence enclose a clause which could drop out of the sentence without impacting its readability at all. "Which was a first" is an aside, an editorial comment, and when I read it I hear a slight pause as the narrator turns to look me in the eye and snark for a moment. If you drop the clause out...

The corner store opened on time that morning and I bought a six-pack of beer. 

...you don't need a comma, but I'm not nit-picky enough to complain of someone put one before "and." 

#2 and #3 are two manifestations of the same problem: badly built sentences. Of all the bad ways to build sentences, run-ons and comma splices seem the most obvious and clunky to me so either Grammarly's software can't reliably detect the rest or first drafts are messier than I thought. 

That store never opens on time, the owner's out drunk every night and too hung-over to get up. 

His beer selection is good though he gets that much right. 

Both of those sentences are so easy to fix that I had some trouble writing them incorrectly. Are these really so common? 

Which leaves #5: "a" and "an" vs. "the." This one is actually a good point because there's a power in the definite article "the." It assumes foreknowledge. Insinuates importance.

He was the knight for the job. 

Conversely, "a/an" de-emphasizes. It can completely shift the meaning of the sentence.

He was a knight for a job.

These are very subtle, too, since they're tiny words and very common.

I've put text into Grammarly a few times and yes, it's much better than Word's auto-correct. It certainly has the impartiality that can be helpful when you've been staring at a story for too long.

Whether it's good enough to sift out the finer points of definite and indefinite articles... mmm, I'd have to try it out some more. Has anyone here used Grammarly? What was your impression?

Cutting the story flab

I've talked about major reconstruction of story lines before (here) but this one's a little different. I was revising a short story recently and had the feeling that it was longer than it really needed to be. It was clocking in at just over 9k -- which is a hard sell in the market, too -- and writing it had been kinda fraught with insecurities for various reasons.

Being a world-builder, I'm always itching to do it. My gut kept insisting that the gender politics needed more explaining... but this is just a short story. You don't have to explain everything. (You don't have to explain everything in a novel, either, but that's a different post.)

It's been a while since I've used my revision avatar.

Anyhow, I singled out one scene that could definitely be cut. Why? Because it's mostly me caving in to the world-building itch. My MC is being shown around and explained to, rather than doing/realizing/progressing. Onto the chopping block the scene went.

But: that's not to say there was no useful information at all. I didn't want to make a hole or leave readers confused.

What to keep
Before cutting the scene, I looked through it for:

• new characters met
• first descriptions of people or places -- a subset of world-building, true
• character arc moments -- questions raised, answered, realizations made
• plot developments -- usually the scene's being cut for a lack of these, but check for them anyway
• essential world-building -- see below

In my case, there were some detailed first descriptions and some minor character moments that needed to be salvaged. Then I tossed hundreds of words of tension-less world-building (read: infodumping.)

None of it was essential? Correct, because this is a short story. I was only introducing things that would be seen later, in my case. Were this a novel, that could be given a little leeway. This is a short story that's already on the too-big side, though. The reader can meet these details as they happen during a plot-relevant moment. Anything that doesn't happen during a plot-relevant moment isn't strictly necessary.

What to do with them
So I had a handful of scraps that I needed to work into someplace else. I went looking for:

• relevant conversations, or ones that can be steered toward the topic
• descriptions at more relevant moments that could be expanded a bit
• if there'd been new characters to meet, a better place or possibly drop the character entirely

Overall, I cut 1500 words and worked about 300 back in. Net savings: 1200 words. It's still big for a short story, but we'll see if there's any use for it.

Fixing it in revision

I'm a plotter. When I start writing a story, I've already worked out the sequence of events, the character arcs, etc., to some degree of detail. There's always room for changes within those plots and outlines because it's not unusual for characters to inform me that they're going to misbehave. Things generally stick to the outline, though.

Well, except for Hawks & Rams. That one went straight off the rails and tore cross-country for a few miles. The outlines bore only a slight resemblance to the first draft.

Fix it in revision
That's what I said while I was writing it. Now it's time to do it.

Scale to fit
Since I was coming off writing Disciple, I wrote out four different plot/character arcs for H&R. That sort of complexity isn't at all unusual for a big series of fantasy novels.

Hawks & Rams is much smaller, though. I wasn't sure before I wrote it, but now I know that it really is a novella -- not a novel. I know which character has to make the big choice at the climax, and how he gets there. While the other characters have their own trajectories, they don't make the personal changes that my main character does.

Therefore, I only need to lay out one character arc and one plot. I know what paths the other characters will follow, but it's not the standard inciting incident, build to a climax and then resolution that my main character faces. The main plot -- the series of events that drive Heathric toward his personal crisis -- needs some improvement too...

Raise the tension
More challenges, more complications, more tension are always better. Well, within reason. Toward the end of Apocalypto (terrible movie, sadly) the climactic scene for one character consists of her being trapped in a well, which is rapidly flooding due to the rain, balancing one screaming small child on her head (because the water's neck deep) while simultaneously giving birth to the second that she's carrying... I was just waiting for piranha to show up. For a kitchen sink to fall on her. You know, something that would actually be a challenge. (/sarcasm)

Raise the tension without tipping over into ridiculousness. It helps to go through the sequence of events with a fresh mind (because you put the story aside for a few months and worked on something else) and re-consider why things played out that way. What would've been uglier/nastier/messier? What would've been completely unexpected? What would've been ridiculous, so that you know where your boundaries are?

Trying to write a query letter for the story and getting feedback on that can help too -- a fresh pair of eyes and questions from a different perspective can bring up ideas you wouldn't have thought of.

Devil's in the details
The trickiest part of revisions is, of course, all the little things that shift when events change. People are at a different emotional point, they say different things, topics drop out of conversation that needed to be brought up for something down the line... get out the fine toothed comb!

Have you fixed a story plot recently? What did it need?

IN OTHER NEWS: I've landed my first speaking gig! MRW is hosting a half-day writing workshop on October 26th, and I will be talking about world-building and character development.

Always learning more

It's been at least a year since I looked at my science fiction. When I put it down, I knew it needed work but I was fairly confident in the plot and the action. Well, I'm still confident in the action, but the work it needs is glaringly obvious now.

That's not unusual. If you haven't already heard the advice: you should put a story down for a while and work on something else, then come back to it with fresh eyes.

When I was writing in high school, I did all my revising on paper with a red pen and every single manuscript came away looking like a murder scene. Didn't matter how many drafts there had already been, it seemed. Red ink everywhere, rewriting, adding, deleting useless paragraphs.

My dad said it was because I'd learned so much more about writing since the last revision pass. Which was true.

It's also because when the story is fresh in your mind, you remember exactly what you meant to put on the page. Which isn't necessarily what got onto the page, of course. Things are always lost, in converting vivid hallucinations into little black symbols, but you're always learning new ways to translate.

These days, my revisions aren't so drastic as back in high school. There are a lot of reasons for that: awkward sentences get re-worked in progress, useless paragraphs don't get written in the first place, my outline and scene notes keep me on target, and my awareness of the vocab I'm using is much sharper. When my gut tells me something, it's easier to figure out what it's saying and whether I should trust it. (This has applications outside of writing.) All of that is the result of years of practice, years of writing, and there's no other way to earn those.

And after all these years of writing, I'm still learning the craft. Frankly, I hope I never feel like I've mastered it. If I did, I'd have to assume it would mean I've fallen into a rut or gotten my head stuck up my ass.

So I've been looking at the science fiction I put down a year ago and thinking about how to apply what I learned in the process of writing Disciple to it. I'm thinking this will be a murder-scene-level revision; time to get out that chainsaw.

What's the longest you've put a story down for? How did it look when you came back?

Indie life: Being your own continuity editor

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month!

Last month, I talked about pricing. This month, another self-publishing challenge: not just editing yourself, but being your own continuity editor.

Editing for the storytelling elements is difficult enough -- tightening up the narrative, keeping the action moving -- but there's all the little details too. Making sure the names of the seven moons in the sky are consistent. Remembering that the scene in Part III gets talked about in Part V, and changing one means changing the other. Realizing that one of the characters isn't a knight, halfway through the series, and needing to edit that out -- and it changes how he's treated, in certain situations. Making sure the black-bay horses stay black-bay and the yellow dress that gets ripped up in the laundry room scene isn't worn again later.

Do people notice these things? I do. Not all of the details, but different readers will catch different things, and even momentary confusion is not a writer's friend. Getting caught with continuity errors will make you look amateurish, too, so self-publishers need to ask themselves: do you want to be seen as a professional writer, or just a hobbyist?

Levels of continuity
Continuity is another recursive detail, like plot -- it appears, in equal complexity, at every level of the story. I need to keep track of details changing within each paragraph (the easy side), each scene, each chapter, each book in the series, and throughout all six parts of Disciple (the tougher side.)

Keep your distance
The first thing I need for continuity editing is a certain mental distance from the story. I need to not be sucked into that internal movie, not emotionally invested -- I need to track these details objectively. I find this is easier to do on paper, with a red pen, than while editing on-screen.

Mental distance is an important part of editing in general, of course. The ability to step back from my own emotional investment in the story, to evaluate its structure and execution, is very important. Personally, I think this includes stepping back from opinions like "this is a shitty first draft" as well as from "this part came out so awesome!!1!"

While it's true that a first draft is allowed to be as shitty as it needs to be, just to get it on paper, I don't believe that anything on paper is so shitty that it can't be fixed. I also don't know how seriously other writers use that phrase, but personally, I don't insult my writing. And I don't doubt my ability to fix things; it's just a question of how drastic the surgery will be. There's a good reason I've talked about using a chainsaw to edit my stuff. :)

To-do lists
I keep TO FIX lists for each draft, in each Scrivener file. Many of the things listed are continuity details, accumulated as I wrote other parts, or as realized the implications of one scene would impact another (or needed setting-up, in an earlier scene.) Some of them can be done with search and replace, like the note "Wall Street = Wallside Street" or "Search&destroy -- "firing" archers." Some need more thought, like "Drop mention of Kleelinde, or explain."

How do you keep track of continuity details?

Indulging in a little wallowing

Are you taking the A to Z Challenge in April? I did it last year. It was grueling, fascinating, exhausting, and drew a lot of attention to my blog. This year, I'm going to be blog touring in April to support my release of Disciple, Part II -- which means if you're stuck for a certain letter I WILL GLADLY GUEST BLOG THAT FOR YOU if you'll let me plug my book. Email me: blankenship.louise at gmail dot com. Already taken: L, and either I or Y.

It might be because of my own run-ins with depression, but I have trouble letting characters wallow in their misery. Writing scenes of despair... well, when you look at the darkness the darkness looks back. And despair knows me, that's for sure.

But. Pics or it didn't happen, as they say. Show, don't tell.

This tangentially ties in to the dark night of the soul, letting characters face your demons, and earning that win -- not all consequences are faced physically. Emotional consequences play out in the emotions first, and might manifest as actions as a result of that, whether it's drinking, getting into fights, or attempting suicide...

The danger that my gut is warning me of, in letting characters wallow, is that they aren't moving the plot forward. Lying in bed crying might me accurate realism, maybe even sympathetic character development, but it's difficult to use that to get to the next phase of the story.

Your character might have some intuitive light-bulb moment while crying in bed. An angry guy might go out, get drunk, and pick a fight with just the right/wrong person... which could work or could seem too convenient, depending on the serendipity involved. How would you use your character's melancholy ruminations to keep the plot moving?

Writing the scene can be technically challenging too. Is the character just lying in bed, face in the pillow? If they're doing something, how do you work their emotions into the action? How's your stock of metaphors, and what will you do when you've used all your melancholy adjectives and now you need some more?

This is on my mind because of the revisions I'm making to Disciple, Part V. It felt very... lean in the writing; my gut said it needed more, but waffled over what that was. My betas have indicated that the "more" may be some wallowing. It doesn't sit easy, but my betas have never steered me wrong.

Antagonists: same rules apply

One of my betas said: "I'm not seeing the crazy, ruthless evil empress we've been building up to" and pointed out some tell-tale signs of ruthfulness.

Now that I've spent some time away from Disciple, Part VI, I'm less wrapped up in wrestling every single plotline that needed resolution. I can more clearly focus on individual problems. That just goes to show that the old advice of putting your story aside for a while is perfectly valid -- but I want to focus on bad guys for a moment. Antagonists.

Bringing their A game
A story isn't so much about how a character managed to do something, but how they worked so hard to reach their goal and almost didn't succeed.

The obstacles between the characters and their goals need to be realistic, well explained, and daunting. If these take the form of antagonists, those also need to be realistic, explained, and daunting. By "explained," I mean that the readers need to know what the antagonist wants and what s/he is capable of doing to get it. We have all seen those "Meet the Bad Guy" scenes where he rants and raves and does something horrible to one of his own flunkies so that we know how bad, bad, bad he is. We should try to be more elegant than that, but it gets the job done.

Whatever's going on in your story, your antagonist is in it to win it. Real antagonists act accordingly, and since they're real they should also stay in character.

So when my beta asked why my empress was suddenly sneaking around when she'd previously done some fairly ballsy things... well, guilty as charged. Time to fix it.

Same rules of character apply
Like protagonists, antagonists need to be fully developed characters. They don't necessarily have a character arc in which they grow and change -- though that makes for an excellent story if you can do it -- but they need to obey all the rules of consistency and realism.

I had laid out a pattern for the empress, and she needed to stick to it. With my 20/20 hindsight, I see the arrogance that I had ascribed her later actions to was not part of the pattern I had set. Or, rather, her arrogance had previously taken the form of ballsy, effective action. Therefore, more of that was needed -- in spite of the measures my protagonists were now taking against her tactics. Because the empress is kick-ass scary like that. She didn't get this job on her looks.

A craftsman should enjoy his work. 

Unfortunately for my characters, a little brainstorming has yielded some interesting ways to make the end of Disciple more difficult for them. About 2.5 chapters at about the two-thirds mark are going to be chainsawed accordingly, and then we'll spackle over the the reattachment scars. Paging Dr. Dexter...

Wordiness: clear as mud

Mooderino wrote a nice post on wordiness, on Tuesday. I wanted to comment, but that's one of many blog pages that won't let me post comments (see this for more info) so I'll write a post of my own instead.

Mooderino pointed out that wordiness has its place, and that it's very useful in setting the pace of a scene. The tricky part being, of course, knowing when is a good time to slow the pace of a story down and when's a good time to let it rip.

Most people will agree that action sequences should move fast -- which for me begs the question: when would you want a slow action scene? Most people would think that highly emotional scenes should go slowly -- should they? How does the impact of emotion change when the scene moves quickly?

These are things you learn by consuming other stories alertly -- with awareness of what the storyteller is doing and how they're doing it -- and through the experience of writing your own stories. Your gut has its own opinion of what feels like a good story, and it's a mix of all the stories you've consumed along with your own creative instincts. Which is then smoothed out by the practice of actually doing it over and over.

Revision comes into play, too, because it can be very enlightening to rewrite a scene to change its pace or tone -- both of which are directly impacted by wordiness or lack thereof. This is on my mind because I just had to do it the other night. I'd written a scene with a recently captured prisoner who had a passive, defeated attitude, but on further thought I realized it would be useful if that prisoner had an interest in cutting a deal. In rewriting it, the dialogue shortened, descriptions dropped out, the verbs turned more active, and overall I hope tension came through rather than passivity.

I didn't necessarily set out to shorten the dialogue, drop descriptions, and active up the verbs; for my gut, that's just a natural consequence of upping the tension in a scene. It took a long time for me to gain that kind of reflex for what I was putting on the page. For years, I just spewed out words and was never quite sure why some things worked and some didn't. My grammar was always decent, but I was guilty of some pretty epic and sprawling ruminations that were about as speedy as molasses. With a lot of practice, the awareness began to seep in.

Have you rewritten scenes to change their pace and tone? How did it impact the language you used?

Final polish: voice vs. grammar

I'm putting the final polish on Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet. Then I'm going to publish it.

The line edits I got from my freelance editor (Debra Doyle, respectful namaste) are great. She targeted the places where I was genuinely unclear or poorly structured, and didn't complain about all the stuff I did to create a narrative voice.

A little red-inking that I did a while back.

Which is difficult. I certainly have trouble discerning between Disciple's voice and what's unclear, which is why a line edit is a must. It got me to thinking about what voice is and how we balance it with clarity and grammatical correctness.

Voice is a difficult thing to define, from what I've seen. It's hard to talk about in a concrete way, but I'm going to take a stab at it. Here's a random snippet of Disciple:

My head cocked, on reflex, weighing that. There was more to come, I didn’t doubt. “Yes, m’lord,” I responded, quietly. “I see.”

Now, when it comes to grammar, sentence structure, and voice, I tend to be more instinctive than rigorous. I let my gut make the call, most of the time. My gut says there's nothing wrong with that excerpt. OMG adverb! Yes. And an adverbial phrase, too. That's a different blog post. Let's also skip the first sentence for a moment and consider the second one. I could have said:

I didn't doubt there was more to come. 

and that would be fine and correct. It would fit the voice, even. My gut made this call, and now that I'm looking at it with my brain I'd have to say that I structured the sentence as I did because the emphasis here isn't on what's to come, it's on the narrator's lack of doubt. (The last thing in a sentence carries the most weight.)

The first sentence is more complicated and potentially unclear. I could have said:

My head cocked, on reflex, as I weighed that.

but I dropped two words to shorten the sentence. It's a quick action, a snap judgement. It's got a good, snappy verb in cocked and the implied action of weighing. The next sentence is slower, as the MC thinks a bit, and the verbs are was and didn't. Then we get into what she actually says aloud, which in my head has always been a bit slow and thoughtful. That's probably why I used a big, soft dialogue tag like responded and slowed it down further with an adverb.

Two stylistic sins, by most standards. Get the cat-o'-nine-tails and flog this writer! I will plead voice in my own defense -- but that's not a card you want to pull often. Voice is not an excuse for unclear, sloppy writing. I think you can earn an adverb and a soft dialogue tag with five thousand words of good, tight stuff, but that's only my opinion.

The quote above is just a small snippet; the reader breezes through this in no time. Which is as it should be. This is all supposed to be invisible under normal circumstances. This blog post constitutes far more thought than I usually put into three sentences. I've also slid from talking about grammar into touching on rhythm and pacing at the sentence level -- which is part of voice, too.

Stay tuned for another topic I'm going to pull into this snippet...

Beta readers and the drafting process

A CP and I got to talking about betas, recently, and it set off a number of thoughts about the process of writing and the process of revising. The analogy of sculpting came up -- the progression from a raw chunk of stone to a rough form (first draft), then a refined form (second draft), and then the small details and polish (third draft and onward, or however many drafts any of these stages require).

The questions that came up were about getting beta reader feedback at various stages, and trying to match up the reader to which stage you were at in the process. That's an issue because writing definitely does involve that can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees problem -- or, to stick to the sculpting analogy, that you have your nose smack up against the rock.

After some digesting of the question, my gut feeling is that beta readers will crit to the "done"-ness of the manuscript... regardless. If they see macro-scale problems, they'll mention them rather than fine detail problems. I mean, if someone asks me to crit a story where the antagonists seem so clueless that there's no tension, there isn't much point in me giving feedback on narrative voice. If the characters have no distinguishable motivations, that's more important than the dialogue.

The process of fixing the lack of tension, or giving the characters motivations, is bound to change the narrative voice or the dialogue along the way. Everything in a story is connected to everything else. To stick to the sculpture analogy, all those fine details are directly connected to the underlying rough form. You can't have a perfectly sculpted hairdo just hanging in space, after all. (Unless this is a science fiction story...)

When it comes to the refinements of a story -- the narrative voice, the grammar, fine-detail world-building, the particulars of dialogue that make it snap -- I have my strengths and my weaknesses as a beta reader. Everybody does, since they reflect our strengths and weaknesses as writers. At that level, I can see why you'd want to pick and choose your beta readers carefully. Before that, though, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I suspect that who you hand your early drafts to has more to do with how much you trust them to read that crap and still respect you in the morning. :)

I find I'm more comfortable when I respect my beta readers' writing while still seeing its rough edges. Hopefully, they still respect mine after seeing its wrinkles and bloodstains and the occasional gaping hole.

Do you have your beta readers "labelled" by what they're good at critting for?

The plot doctor is in

You might remember my Plotter FAIL! of a couple months back -- it got a lot of hits.

The fix I came up with worked, more or less, but a small comment from one of my CPs suddenly undermined it all. To paraphrase her: The scene where [big event happens] is kinda rushed. It needs more weight.

The patch I put in because of my Plotter FAIL was what put the squeeze on Big Event Scene. The patch kinda turned into a Big Event itself in the writing -- which meant I ended up with four disasters in my story. This violates the Rule of Three. The patch was causing multiple problems.

It was a good revision session. Pic from Showtime's series Dexter.

So, taking my lead from Dexter, I hung plastic sheeting and prepared to fix the problem. Obviously, the patch and the Big Event needed to merge into one. Tricky, but do-able.

Continuity
One of the biggest concerns in moving events around is the impact it has on the characters. I was moving a scene to slightly earlier in the story, but whichever way you're moving you still need to be aware of where your characters are when the scene begins, how that will impact their reactions to the events, and where they will be when the scene ends.

This is true of any scene, and I think it's easier when you're revising because you can see the whole story more clearly. You are more able to ask:

• Does this make sense dramatically? What problems does it solve and what problems does it create?
• Is there anything the character learned between the two scenes that they won't know when the order of events changes? Or anything they will know, if you're moving an early scene to later? Characters should never act according to information they don't have.
• How does this impact the emotional sequence? Especially if relationships loom large in your story -- moving an event will change its impact. Sit down with your characters and consider all the repercussions carefully.

Logistics
Don't forget about the mundane stuff, either. Worry about the gear the characters have on hand, what they're wearing, how much of the city will burn down in this iteration, what to do with the time you've added or deleted by moving scenes around.

And after you've re-written the whole scene, realize that the city was still on fire at the end... whoops, somebody want to fix that...?

Adjust the fallout
Don't forget to adjust the downstream action to reflect the new sequence of events. Since everything is connected to each other, in a story, shifting a scene will always have some impact further along in the story. Often, that's exactly why you moved the scene in question -- but unexpected details can turn up, so be vigilant.

Have you had to move a major scene? What sorts of problems did that create?

Kickstarter UPDATE! 

I've changed the $100 pledge reward! Go take a look!

I'm running a Kickstarter project to fund the professional editing, proofreading, and cover artwork for my gritty fantasy romance, Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet. There will be six parts in total, published over the course of the next few years.

I'm offering e-books, paperbacks, promotional bookmarks, and more at various pledge levels (ranging from $1 - $100). Check out the project page for my book trailer, budget, and production schedule.

Kickstarter.com is a fundraising platform for all sorts of creative projects. Artists post a profile of their project and offer rewards in exchange for pledged money. The pledges are not collected unless the artist's funding goal is reached within a set period of time. If the goal is reached, the artist receives the money, carries out the project and distributes the rewards promised. It's a fascinating site and easy to lose time in!

Endings: show's over, go home

I wrote this post early in April, during the A to Z Challenge, so it's a little out of date... 

Just to top off Part III, the ending was a problem too. That's fitting, seeing as how a bunch of other things went wrong in this draft:

1. Plotter FAIL! shortly before the climax
2. The Hot Mess in the first third (and according to my betas it's still problematic)
3. Forgot an important step in an important scene
4. ...and then I did one of my edge-of-the-cliff endings

I'll have to label this a habit of mine: I build up to a big climax, which may take a while to convulse its way out, and then bang! Done! Drop the curtain!

A little wrapping up after the climax is appreciated by most readers, I'm given to understand... not that I should carry on for thousands of words, but something. Even when there's a whole Part IV to come.

Things I ought to do after the climax:

• Clean up the mess: this was kinda literal, in Part III. There were people to patch up and a half-destroyed courtyard to try to smooth out.
• Address the fallout: in the middle of the climax, I lobbed a bombshell related to a long-term plot development. Even though the full explanation will wait, it had to be at least partly addressed. Otherwise, the reader will be saying what the heck was that all about?
• Will things be OK? Even a little bit? Amusingly, I just finished reading GRRM's Dance with Dragons where nothing is ever going to be okay and any hints it might be are just the author playing you along so he can twist the knife in your heart. My Part III is 65k and probably half of that is unmitigated combat, so if the reader's half as burned out as I was, we need some hint that things are getting better.

I wrote an epilogue, too. It was a bridge scene that would've been an odd place to start Part IV, but it had several  reasons to be fit in someplace.

What do you find you need to remind yourself to do?

R: Resuscitating lapsed ideas

Everybody has some manuscripts languishing in a comatose state, don't they? I'm talking about full drafts, or at least mostly-done, that suddenly manifested some deep flaw that drained out the spark of life. So you wrapped it up for long-term storage in your mental non-intensive care unit and figured you'd get back to it at some point.

Sometimes these stories resuscitate themselves. Sometimes it takes work. Sometimes you work them over with the shock paddles and mainline hormones through the IV and it still won't twitch.

I've got two in mind: a short story and a novel. Both SF, both Jovian Frontier stories. There are a lot of reasons why stories can lapse into comas, so I'll only talk about why these particular two did.

Wrong MC
I came to the realization that the main character arc in the novel was too muddy. What do I mean by that? My novels tend to include a main action arc -- a sequence of (exciting?) events -- and at least one character arc -- a sequence of (interesting?) changes the MC goes through. The two of them have a relationship, but how closely twined they are varies from story to story.

In this novel, the MC I had settled on did not have a clear objective. She was pulled into a situation and decided to take advantage of it, but why was not sufficiently clear and she made some choices that weren't... all that sensible, which always puts me off a character. This echoed into the main action arc and resulted in some serious "why are we doing this?" moments.

Fatal flaws. I threw it in the drawer (electronically speaking) and let it collect dust.

Then I went to the Viable Paradise workshop and listened to Elizabeth Bear's lecture on plot structure (among other wonderful lectures.) A couple weeks later, I was eating breakfast (I kid you not) and Bear (well, her voice) re-framed the novel's plot in terms of the other major character, whose objectives are far simpler, clearer, and are complicated by the female MC in (amusing?) ways.

My gut's verdict: this will work. I haven't done it yet, but I wrote down the notes.

Non sequitor
The main thing keeping the short story on life support is a pretty good sequence where a small team is working its way through a ghost ship. Its problem is that the character arc has very little to do with the action arc. This makes the character's changes seem to come out of left field and had (more than one) beta asking "What?"

No signs of life in this one. I might cannibalize out that one sequence if it can be used elsewhere. That's a perfectly good use of comatose stories, IMO. Organ harvest.

Why did that story of yours lapse into a coma?

G: Gut

The writer's gut is a vital tool. Your gut tells you what works and what doesn't. It says this sentence sounds right and that one doesn't. Your characters have their roots down in your gut, and they're one avenue for your gut to get its message to you. It's the subconscious side of your writing ability, and it can't always put into words the things it needs to tell you.

When it can't put it into words,
my gut uses anti-aircraft fire

Your talent is in your gut, IMO. Regardless of how much you've got in there, your gut needs to be trained and trusted.

Training
Read, read, read. And then be a five-year-old and ask why about everything. Why did this scene bore me? When did the asshole character turn into a good guy? How many loose ends are "okay" in a story? Why did I know the surprise twist was coming?

Don't limit yourself to "your" genres, either. Read everything and subject it to the same level of scrutiny. Especially stuff you  thought was lame, ineffective or dull.

Literature classes are great, but I have to admit I don't think they're a requirement. Maybe because I didn't take many myself. Movies are also great for studying a lot of techniques relatively quickly -- but books are not movies.

The purpose of training is to show your gut how to express itself by exposing it to both good and bad expressions. Then you have to let it express itself.

Trusting
This is the tough part. Personally, I wanted some proof my gut had a clue about what it kept insisting is "right."

This is why betas are priceless. They can tell you if your gut is pointing you in the right direction. They can tell you what your gut is good at and what it's not so good at. Where you can trust it and where you need to go back with your brain and revise the story to work better.

Because you're going to find that your brain and your gut are at odds, often. But antagonism is dynamic, so let 'em fight it out.

Those things that your betas keep bringing up, keep asking for more of, are the things your gut needs to work on. Maybe you're not letting your gut speak freely. Maybe your gut's strengths are in other places. Maybe your gut is having trouble finding the right words and mechanisms to express itself (as in, it needs more training.)

Personally, my readers keep asking for more of my characters' thoughts and emotions to get onto the page. They want that subjective voice, and they're happy when my gut produces it. For whatever reason, objective voice comes easily to me. It's part of why I gravitate toward science fiction -- that voice is more acceptable in that genre. When I write fantasy, it's something of a problem.

Is my Talent lacking? Am I just holding my gut back? (shrugs) Learning is a continuous process. I'll keep working at it, either way.

Fixing that hot mess

The scene I revised on Sunday night was a hot mess. I knew it was a mess when I wrote it, but I kept plowing on and figured I would fix it in revision. (definition of hot mess at urbandictionary.com, the "attractive" part being the long-term story elements I got to lay out in the scene.)

Well, there I was. Revising. Time to pay the piper.

By coincidence, part of this scene turned up in my Lucky 7 meme a few days ago. I thought I would blog some more about it, maybe talk about clarity or the revision process... but it was too much mess to just pull out a chunk and try to analyze it. On a sentence level, the writing was meh but the real problems were large scale.

Poorly structured event
This scene was supposed to take place at a parley between the king of the besieged city and an envoy of the enemy army outside. Both sides have to demonstrate a little trust -- however superficially -- and be polite in exchange for a chance to suss out the enemy's true situation.  My besieged city was not going to surrender, but it was a chance to talk to their inside man in the enemy's army. The army wasn't going to lift the siege, but it was a chance to see the situation inside the city and maybe slip an agent in.

Shuffling everyone into proper places as befitted a formal event changed most of the conversations, where the scene started and how the action played out. 

Extra character
Because of world-building details that were later resolved, I had an extra character who was unbalancing the scene. If he was there, he should've been involved in what happened. But I couldn't allow that, at the same time, so he was just noodling around in the background. Fortunately, I could edit him out entirely and other people could fill his shoes when it came to a few bits of information.

Missed lines of action
This made my hair curl. People just appeared when they were needed. The main part of the meeting wasn't the focus of the scene, but that didn't mean people could pop in and out at will. The king doesn't get to just suddenly leave the negotiating table, even if there's a commotion outside. He sends the captain, or he decides the envoy's trying to pull something and has him wrestled to the ground.

A lot of this came down to what I call "background tracking", too, those little notes of someone being here or there, doing something, that keeps the background of the scene in motion. Badly lacking in the hot mess.

Illogical dialogue
Dialogue is not usually a problem for me, so I'd like to take this opportunity to fall flat on my face.

“Am I part of the city’s mettle, then?”
“Let them wonder,” he said. “We’ve our own plans, in this. Are they always so late?”
Sir Theo, standing on my other side, said, “One’s client is never late.” 

What? >>delete<<

Meh writing

Kiefan set his boot on Dennode’s ruined chest, bones crunching further, and tore the man’s head off with a hard twist. He slung it and the envoy caught the bloody thing in his belly, falling back was knocked onto his ass from by the impact.

Kiefan took spun Bíden around by the collar and shoved him toward Captain Rostislav. “Put that filth on a horse!” The captain took the lead and was less than gentle in obeying hauled him off to the waiting palfrey without letting the old man catch his balance.

There was plenty more, but I forgot to copy out the previous text so I could show my edits. And now that I've rewritten it and written a post about it, I can barely see it anymore and I need to put it aside for a while.

What was the last hot mess you had to revise?

Lucky 7 plus a red pen

There was an open tag for the Lucky 7 meme and I need some blog filler, so... (CAUTION: violence ahead)

The rules:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS/WIP
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines, sentences, or paragraphs, and post them as they’re written.

4. Tag 7 authors
5. Let them know


From Disciple, Part III: Embers on the Wind

Parselev spun the charm through me, sending it down my arm and into the captain. I watched his windpipe knit shut and the slash close before my eyes. Loshadsky went limp as the pain faded, eyes falling shut. My teacher pulled me to my feet by my hand.

“It was good work, nonetheless,” he told me.

“Let him keep his head,” Kiefan announced, turning to his father. The Arceal envoy sat on his knees before the king, hands spread and empty, disarmed. “He can return this one.”

Kiefan put his boot on Dennode’s ruined chest, bones crunching further, and tore the man’s head off with a hard twist and a pull. He slung it and the envoy caught it in his belly, falling back onto his ass from the impact.

King Wilhelm gave him a kick for good measure. “Get out of my city. You! What did you know of this?” He pointed with his drawn sword, at the remaining Suevi.

Sir Theo had pulled Bídon aside, leaning close with urgent eyes. The king’s demand turned them both, at attention. “He knew nothing, Majesty,” Sir Theo answered.

“You would say so.”

 
That's completely raw, unrevised text and I cringe at the sight of it. I can't help hitting it with some red ink.


Parselev spun the charm through me, sending it down my arm and into the captain. I watched His windpipe knit shut and the his slashed throat closed before my eyes. Loshadsky went fell limp as the pain faded, eyes falling sliding shut.

¶ My teacher pulled me to my feet by my hand. “It was good work, nonetheless,” he told me said.

“Let him keep his head,” Kiefan announced, turning to his father [do something more interesting/relevant]. “He can return this one.”

The Arceal envoy sat on his knees before the king, hands spread and empty, disarmed. [add something to fill this out] “He can return this one.”

Kiefan put set his boot on Dennode’s ruined chest, bones crunching further, and tore the man’s head off with a hard twist and a pull. He slung it and the envoy caught it the bloody thing in his belly, falling back onto his ass from the impact.

King Wilhelm gave him a kicked him for good measure. “Get out of my city. You! What did you know of this?” He pointed, with his drawn sword, at the remaining Suevi.

Sir Theo had pulled Bídon aside to one side, leaning close with in urgent eyes discussion. The king’s demand turned them both, at attention. “He knew nothing, Majesty,” Sir Theo answered.

“You would say so.”


That's a start. Copy/paste into Scrivener and it will get more work as I revise Part III.

I'll make this an open tag, too. Everybody reading, consider yourself tagged. You don't have to revise what you post -- that was just me being self-conscious. Though it might make an interesting addition to the meme...

Worthy of her love...

I love Waterhouse's paintings...

For the record,  I do not believe in  Love at First Sight. Well, not true love. Lust, yes. I might go so far as to accept Good Chemistry at First Sight, but not a life-long relationship. That takes time.

When one has godlike powers over one's characters, making them fall in love is as easy as typing -- in theory. If you treat your characters as fully independent human beings and they've grown into that role as much as possible, they can fight you on that. And you should listen to your characters when they fight you, but that's another blog post.

Convincing the readers your characters are legitimately falling in love is another matter, as well. In revising Part II of my fantasy monstrosity, I'm trying to address one aspect of that which my betas brought up: worthiness.

Worthiness, for me, is shorthand for the intersection of a number of factors: sympathetic character, dangers faced, and potential reward. I've gotten snagged on one particular part of it, this time.

Sympathetic character

Readers need to be on your character's side for at least one reason. Trying to understand this interplay of words, deeds, expectations, voice... is a how-to-write book unto itself, of course. The good news is that I seem to have managed this mischief, according to my betas.

Potential reward

In romance, this is true love and the happy ending -- however you're defining that within your genre. Or however your readers are defining it. Or what the readers are willing to accept. Maybe I should ask my betas about that...

Danger

There's no tension in having things handed to your characters on a silver platter, of course. If romance is a part of the plot, then it's either threatened by the circumstances or it's creating circumstances which are a threat.

(Because if your characters were to just punch out at the end of the day and go on a hot date with no worries, it would seem pretty irrelevant to the story, wouldn't it?)

Forces threatening the relationship

This isn't the issue in my story, but it can be done quite well -- it could be war tearing the lovers apart, their families, a jealous ex-spouse...

The relationship itself creating the threat

Forbidden love, secret affairs, the danger of losing all you hold dear... somebody get a spoon, we're eating this stuff up. Trick is, both of the characters need to face consequences for engaging in the relationship. Ideally, fairly equal and fairly devastating consequences. This was where Part II hit a snag.

Confession time: this part of the story has a distant root in Titanic. Somebody somewhere commented that if Jack and Rose's social statuses had been reversed, Jack would've been some asshole out slumming for tail with a gold-digging girl and there would've been no sympathy for either of them. Well, stupid me, I set out to see if it could be made to work. (Of course it can. Anything can be made to work, right?)

So the prince and the peasant-born healer cross paths and fall hard for each other. At risk for her: her ability to continue working and developing her magical abilities, her reputation and her future marriageability. At risk for him: um... well... stern disapproval? slap on the wrist? being told to pay her off and forget her?

To be fair, the disapproval of the right person can be devastating. I've created a prince who is essentially honorable and good -- or he's be some asshole out slumming for tail -- and he would be devastated by the disapproval of the right person. He'd survive, though. He'd be willing to take whatever lumps were required, but in the end the worst thing he could lose would be her. And that's not equal to her losing both him and her future.

Also, underneath it all is the very plausible solution that the prince could just reach into the royal treasury and apply sufficient gold to make the problem go away. Set her up as his mistress on the side and if anybody has a problem with that, there's a dueling field just over here...

I doubt that would satisfy the readers, though. It's not risky. It's not honorable, so it would be out of character for him. And it the prince still isn't worthy of her love if he doesn't have something real and tangible at stake.

(Heh, one of the supporting characters would like to point out that the healer's weight in gold coin is a perfectly real and tangible stake... shush, Theo.)

This post has run long enough, so I'll ask: what risks are you story's lovers taking?

Writing hell: the query

Cram, cram, cram. It will fit.

A query letter is even shorter than a synopsis -- 250 words for the whole thing, preferably shorter. First, a recap of the four questions I ask myself before writing a synopsis:

1. Whose story is this? What is the story?
2. What is your inciting incident?
3. What is your climax?
4. What are the major events that got us from the inciting incident to the climax?

You will need #1, #2 and #4 for writing your query. Maybe #3, maybe not. The goal of a query letter is to intrigue the reader enough to want to see more. To do that, you need to write something that communicates the following:

This is an INTERESTING CHARACTER (see #1) with a SERIOUS PROBLEM (#1 and #2) that he or she is DOING SOMETHING ABOUT despite the danger (#4)

Apply Occam's Razor liberally. Ignore the blood for now. Don't worry about voice, even, just get this on the page. Various sources have pointed out that the above information will probably cover about the first third of your novel -- which is true because in the first third we meet your characters, get through the inciting incident, and make some progress toward the goal despite dangers and set-backs.

Then give the BOOK'S NAME, WORD COUNT, GENRE, and list any publishing credits you may have, awards you WON (nobody cares how close you got if you didn't win), and/or prestigious writing programs you've graduated from. 

Then thank the reader for their time and sign your name. 

Bam, done. Now put it away for an absolute minimum of 24 hours and get something done on your current project -- because you've got something new in the works, yes? 

When you come back to your query, re-write it to add voice if you can. You'll probably notice other problems. And once you've made it as clear as you can, you're going to need to show it to your fellow Writing Hell sufferers. Preferably ones who know nothing about your story. They will explain how you have failed to do any of the things listed above even though you really tried to.

That's okay. Revise and repeat. Going through six or eight drafts is not unusual and does not mean you suck.

You will question the clarity of your story at some point, though, and that is not a bad thing. Maybe a little trimming in some places, expansion in others, would make it easier to answer question #1 above. Maybe some scenes need more focus so it's clear how they fit into question #4. Did the inciting incident (for #2) need to be more dramatic? More traumatic?

These are all vague questions, I know, and only you and your gut can answer them. Writing a query during the revision process helps me think about them, I've found.

On using all that world-building...

I've been posting about world-building a lot, and I've recently been thinking about another aspect of it: what the readers want from the writer. Because as we know, only the tip of your world-building iceberg actually appears in your story...

How much of the iceberg do YOU want?

I've gotten a huge amount of feedback on Course Corrections. Three people read the first draft. The first two chapters and the outline were workshopped at VP. Four people read the second draft. I've got two, maybe three lined up for the third -- I can't believe my luck in this, to be honest. I've been writing for a long, long time but getting a variety of feedback is new for me.

Of the seven who've read the whole manuscript so far, they've shaken out into an interesting bell curve. At one end, confusion due to insufficient info-dumps. At the other, the assertion that the info-dumps are just fine and shouldn't be touched. In the middle, people pointing out a few unclear areas and saying the world-building might actually be slowing the story down a little.

So I've been trying to synthesize a consensus. A fellow Viable Paradise graduate pointed out that everybody has different expectations when it comes to world-building, and I've spent a couple days unpacking that thought.

I think of myself as an easy-going reader most of the time. I'm willing to wait for explanations or just accept that we're doing this because this is how we do things -- up to a point. If we're riding cool motorcycles without helmets, you don't need to explain that to me. If we're killing kittens and puppies, I'm going to need a heck of a good reason.

Obviously, other people are going to want more. Some people want it explained right now. Others  have different priorities when it comes to information. I'm biased toward science and technical details, personally. Relationship histories are okay, but not my top priority to find out about in a story. I like anthropology and sociology, if it's relevant. A lot of people talk about sounds, smells, other sensory data but to be honest...? They're distinctly secondary for me.

My writing is biased by my priorities, of course. And it's an easy guess that people with similar preferences will find my writing enjoyable. The struggle is to find your balance between what you think is a reasonable amount of info and the sum of what all your readers want, I suppose.

What sorts of things do you most want the writer to tell you about?

Cutting room floor

I'm nearly finished with the second draft of Course Corrections and moving on to Orbital Shifts.

My cutting room floor is splattered with red ink to fix:

• "s/he nodded" and other twitches involving sitting, standing, and turning around.
• added smells, sounds and other senses where I could. I forget to do an "establishing shot" sometimes, though my betas like the ones I do remember. 
• a good handful of "agreed," "replied", "wondered" and such dialogue tags. Also, "answered" though I left some of those where the connection might be unclear. I've gotten better about tags, but still need to keep an eye on them.
• "was (verb)ing" turned into "(verb)ed."
• changed a minor character's name to avoid confusion with a major character.
• rebroke paragraphs to separate action from dialogue it wasn't directly related to.
• fixed some terms and details that evolved over the course of two books.
• tried to separate out dialogue styles into three main groups: booters, planet-siders and the Russians (who were all booters.)
• cut a short, awkward scene that could be turned into one sentence of summary.

I added one scene at the front and completely re-wrote one at the end. But overall, this was neither traumatic nor horrible. When I finish I'm going to do a few manuscript-wide searches for some of my knee-jerk words: perked, grimaced, poker face, "..." (think cut those down to size, but just to check) and phrases like "set her mouth in a line."

Course Corrections may need an epilogue, technically, but... not feeling one right now. Orbital Shifts starts fairly soon after the end of this, so there isn't a lot to cover between the two.

Huge shout out to all my VP feedbackers for their help -- and even more to the two betas who read this before I workshopped it. Brian and Kristen, rock on.  

I'm not NaNo-ing, though I really thought about it this year. I'm rolling with revisions and I don't want to interrupt the energy. But I will be cheering you all from the sidelines!